May and June are the months when English literature and its landscape come into harmony. Drive through Warwickshire today and you will step into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Go down to Dorchester and you're back in Hardy's Wessex and Far From the Madding Crowd.

This is not a sentimental fallacy. Centuries of poetry and fiction have shaped the image of Britain to outsiders. As spring morphs into summer, the land of lost content fills up with so many scenes from the English classics. Emma's picnic on Box Hill. Mole taking a break from spring cleaning to mess about in a boat with Rat. Alice and her sisters being rowed upstream by a stammering young maths don. The river carries the Lady of Shalott, "half sick of shadows", as well as the drowned Ophelia. "There is a willow grows aslant a brook," is one of Shakespeare's most pitch-perfect lines.

There are negative associations, too. In a famous essay, VS Naipaul confesses that he saw himself "coming to England as to some purely literary region where I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer". But when he found that the language of Milton and Wordsworth had no relevance to his experience, he suffered a double alienation.

Literary England is a small, cohesive place; its capital is even smaller, once a city where Shakespeare, Marlowe and Nashe might have met for dinner. Literary London presents other tableaux, based on letters and diaries, gossip and reminiscence: Dr Johnson rattling his stick on the railings on his way back to Gough Square; Keats shaking hands with Coleridge on a lane in Highgate. Coleridge told a friend: "There is death in that hand."

In the making of a literary brand, it helps to have writers of genius: Dickens describing the pre-Victorian metropolis like a special correspondent for posterity. Wilde in De Profundis tormenting Bosie with the humiliations of his journey to Reading jail. Barrie spinning Peter Pan fantasies to his "lost boys" in Kensington Gardens. Greene fire-watching in Gower Street during the blitz. It's hard to cross Clapham Common and not think of The End of the Affair.

Leaving London, the new world's appeal to our imagination is different: a vision of liberty and optimism on an expanding frontier. Yet the US, and its landscape, is almost too vast and various for a single vision. Twain was perhaps the last American writer to capture something essential about his society as a whole in Huckleberry Finn. Thereafter, it has been the great cities of American fiction that colonise the global imagination: the New York of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Jay McInerney or the Chicago of Ring Lardner and Saul Bellow.

The newer parts of the US are still struggling with their identity. On the west coast, some commentators wrestle with the idea that Los Angeles is Nowheresville. This, as the critic Adam Kirsch puts it, is because in the literary imagination, the place is "still a colony". It gets written about, from the outside, by visitors who look at it without affection or understanding.

In The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West described the place as "a Sargasso of the imagination". This is doubly ironic because, above and beyond books, Los Angeles is indeed the capital of the world's cinematic fantasies, a dream factory. Unlike the English landscape, it's hardly real. One calculation says that more than a hundred films have dealt with the destruction of the city by apocalypse: fire, flood, earthquake, nuclear holocaust and alien invasion.

The process by which LA is misunderstood says a lot about the relationship of literature to landscape. Of the three English writers who made the city their home, Huxley, Isherwood and Chandler, perhaps only the author of The Big Sleep wrote about it from the inside, from the bottom up, through the eyes of its drunks and drug addicts. Chandler's LA is correspondingly more vivid and enduring. Writers must somehow own their landscape before it can become literature.

In the absence of climatic subtlety, aka the weather, perhaps this is more difficult. LA has so much going for it, but lacks the blessing of English literature: the weather and the seasons.

Ghost of Bin Laden haunts the bookshops

One of the little remarked successes of the British book trade has been the extraordinary sales of a small paperback entitled Where's Bin Laden? which has tempted more than 300,000 purchasers since its publication in 2006. Now, the demise of OBL has inspired our publishers. Heinemann, for example, is rushing out Beyond Bin Laden: The Future of Terror, declaring that Islamic "radicals still wish us harm and we must fight on". No doubt the White House and the CIA will be thrilled to have the support of "a provocative collection of essays edited and introduced by Pulitzer prize winner Jon Meacham" – a survey of the future of al-Qaida, of Afghanistan and of Pakistan. The pen, after all, is mightier than the sword, though possibly no match for a US Navy Seal from Team 6.

Out of Africa comes a wave of new talent

Is Africa the new literary frontier? As planning for the Zanzibar Literary festival, directed by Geoffrey Dobbs, gets under way, the Caine prize, the self-styled "African Booker", celebrates its 12th anniversary with a list of new writers selected by Libyan novelist Hisham Matar and a prize jury. The shortlist includes: NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe); Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda); Tim Keegan (South Africa); Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana); David Medalie (South Africa). Previous winners include Uganda's Monica Arac de Nyeko and Binyavanga Wainaina, from Kenya, who founded the literary magazine Kwani?, to publish work by new Kenyan writers. Perhaps the next step would be for the Booker prize to remember it is open to Commonwealth writers and take African writing seriously.